Skribs posted a link to this in another thread so I went and had a look at it and I think it is the best cat DPS guide I have seen. Point all your druid friends to it!
Nabterayl's Cat DPS guide (from Wowhead forums)
Thanks for spotting it Skribs!
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Nabterayl's Cat DPS guide (from Wowhead forums)Follow
Well worth a spotlight...fantastic thread. Should be mandatory reading for all feral druids. I cringe whenever I see druids Mangling from the front in a party environment. Did you see the comment in another thread that with the next patch certain undead and mechanicals might bleed for us? That'd be HUGE and end the Ferocious Bite debate once and for all.
In fact the discussion of doing maximum damage in context of not drawing aggro is so good that I wish players of ALL classes would read it. Especially, of course, that think a dps report is their personal scorecard. I run a damagemeter but have started refusing to run reports for players are obsessed with their own dps # to the detriment of the party. I get a really good laugh every time one of them says "Anybody got a damagemeter?" after fubar'ing pull after pull and I respond "Yes, but I'm not running a report for you." : )
In fact the discussion of doing maximum damage in context of not drawing aggro is so good that I wish players of ALL classes would read it. Especially, of course, that think a dps report is their personal scorecard. I run a damagemeter but have started refusing to run reports for players are obsessed with their own dps # to the detriment of the party. I get a really good laugh every time one of them says "Anybody got a damagemeter?" after fubar'ing pull after pull and I respond "Yes, but I'm not running a report for you." : )
I wasn't aware anyone invited Druids to do Cat DPS in Outlands instances anymore :p
Warne wrote:
I wasn't aware anyone invited Druids to do Cat DPS in Outlands instances anymore :p
I get invited. Just gotta have friends. Besides not like we lack cc, sleep/Bear/cyclone. When there is need, can always switch to bear and 21k armor in cat gear is nothing to sniff at.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 3:22am by Elustriel
I get invited too. Where else you going to get good if not great dps that can OT, OH, and battle rez?
I got invited a lot too.
Something that doesn't make sense to me. The discussion on why not to use Ferocious Bite just absolutely makes no sense.
Let's ignore the convoluted explanation, it is meaningless. Let's break things down to their most simple form.
A talented Shred = 42 Energy Points.
Ferocious Bite = 35 Energy points + whatever you have left, usually 5 as ticks are 20 energy points at once, ergo FB usually uses 40 energy points if you use it as soon as you can. Still less than Shred.
Ferocious Bite does a lot more damage than Shred. A LOT. A Shred crit at the point my feral druid is at will hit for around 2K damage, maybe more and maybe less depending on the armor of the target. On average, my 5 combo point / 40 energy FBs will crit for well over 3K damage.
It is not like Shred does damage based on how many combo points you have. If you have 5 combo points and you are fighting a bleed immune mob, why not Ferocious Bite it? The argument that you have to wait longer to Shred again is meaningless. Ferocious Bite uses less energy than Shred if you use it properly.
I don't understand the argument not to use Ferocious Bite at all. I was topping the DPS meters in Kara last night, and I used FB all the time. I will continue doing so because no counter-argument makes the slightest bit of sense to me.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 4:45pm by Lorimath
Another issue with the thread:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 4:51pm by Lorimath
Quote:
In other words, because FB sets your energy back to 0, you have to wait 8.5 seconds after every FB before you can Shred again. If you look at the efficiency numbers again, you’ll see that Ferocious Bite isn’t even that much better than Shred, particularly at high levels of attack power. So the interruption to your Shred cycle just isn’t worth it. Only use Ferocious Bite if you’re fighting the last mob in the pull and FB would actually kill the mob.
Let's ignore the convoluted explanation, it is meaningless. Let's break things down to their most simple form.
A talented Shred = 42 Energy Points.
Ferocious Bite = 35 Energy points + whatever you have left, usually 5 as ticks are 20 energy points at once, ergo FB usually uses 40 energy points if you use it as soon as you can. Still less than Shred.
Ferocious Bite does a lot more damage than Shred. A LOT. A Shred crit at the point my feral druid is at will hit for around 2K damage, maybe more and maybe less depending on the armor of the target. On average, my 5 combo point / 40 energy FBs will crit for well over 3K damage.
It is not like Shred does damage based on how many combo points you have. If you have 5 combo points and you are fighting a bleed immune mob, why not Ferocious Bite it? The argument that you have to wait longer to Shred again is meaningless. Ferocious Bite uses less energy than Shred if you use it properly.
I don't understand the argument not to use Ferocious Bite at all. I was topping the DPS meters in Kara last night, and I used FB all the time. I will continue doing so because no counter-argument makes the slightest bit of sense to me.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 4:45pm by Lorimath
Another issue with the thread:
Quote:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 4:51pm by Lorimath
Quote:
Quote:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Ummm...in a raid if you are in kitty and you pull agro, in kitty gear, you quite likely die, a rogue can just vanish - if they dodge the 1st hit :)
As far as the FB discussion goes, the full maths of the various situations is too comlicated for me to bother working out personally, but it has been done on ElitistJerks, Emmerald's forums and other places that I have read and they all agree that FB is marginally better than not FB'ing (on bleed immune mobs) only if you can use it at 35 energy (or a little bit over). If you get to 45-50 energy, then the DPS/energy ratio drops below that of shred and you are better off throwing in another shred, then letting your energy tick up and hitting FB.
Others have shown that you only lose a very small amount of DPS if you just keep Mangle up and Shred away (ignoring combo points) compared to using FB at 4-5 combo pts.
Happily for all of us, this will all become irrelevant with the next patch as they are making undead & mecahnicals subject to bleed effects! Yay!
SOME elementals will still be immune, though.
I wondered about that. What would be their reasoning for making the undead & mechs vulnerable to bleeds but no elementals? Maybe there is a particular fight that it might affect somewhere.
RareBeast wrote:
Quote:
Quote:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Ummm...in a raid if you are in kitty and you pull agro, in kitty gear, you quite likely die, a rogue can just vanish - if they dodge the 1st hit :)
If you are in a raid and a rogue pulls aggro, the rogue quite likely dies. In a heroic even. I always joke that rogues are the squishiest classes because they die so frequently. They don't have time to vanish when they get one-shot.
I pulled aggro in Karazhan last night. I dodged 5 attacks in a row and was fine. I pulled aggro in a seperate situation. I took about half my health in one hit so I shifted to bear. I survived very easily. I still have 20k armor, like 14k hp, and a lot of resilience in my dps gear. Heck, since I've stacked so much AGI on my dps gear, I have more dodge on it than I do on my tank gear. And that's all unbuffed. I could actually offtank Karazhan in my dps gear without ever switching to tank gear. Heck, I've tanked two mobs at once in my dps gear there.
Druids have the most survivability of any class out there. It's a rarity when I die. Rogues die almost constantly. As soon as a boss has an AOE, it's like a rogue massacre.
Eugh - the first section is terribly written, and would confuse anyone who doesn't already know how these things work, IMO.
He talks about DPSer A having an innate threat reduction, then his first set of numbers are talking about "threat generated", when clearly what he means to compare is damage done, since the threat numbers quoted do not include DPSer A's threat reduction.
He also doesn't explain how the statement that DPSer A stopped "92 threat short of pulling aggro" is calculated, and I don't think it's right.
If DPSer A has a 29% threat reduction, he should be able to incur 1099/(1 - 0.29) = 1547 "unmodified" threat before pulling aggro, not 1099 x 1.29 = (edit, just ran that through the calc, I assumed it would be 1392 and it's not, now I have no idea where 92 threat came from :D )
I'll accept that I may be misunderstanding how Blizzard actually implement a threat reduction of x%, but the calculation above is certainly how I'd interpret a "29% threat reduction", in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Even if I'm wrong, he should show how he gets those numbers.
Then there's the downright peculiar
followed by
Eh? DPSer A somehow upped his DPS by over 50%, for an 8% threat increase?
Even ignoring the way that the original A vs B comparison is unclear as to how A's threat reduction is taken into account, I can't see how the quoted numbers can both be correct.
If anyone can explain to me why those numbers are correct, I will gratefully accept that I'm talking out my ***, and go back to school :)
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 7:47pm by zhaharik - I have a nasty feeling I'm going back to school, but looking forward to finding out why :)
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 7:48pm by zhaharik
He talks about DPSer A having an innate threat reduction, then his first set of numbers are talking about "threat generated", when clearly what he means to compare is damage done, since the threat numbers quoted do not include DPSer A's threat reduction.
He also doesn't explain how the statement that DPSer A stopped "92 threat short of pulling aggro" is calculated, and I don't think it's right.
If DPSer A has a 29% threat reduction, he should be able to incur 1099/(1 - 0.29) = 1547 "unmodified" threat before pulling aggro, not 1099 x 1.29 = (edit, just ran that through the calc, I assumed it would be 1392 and it's not, now I have no idea where 92 threat came from :D )
I'll accept that I may be misunderstanding how Blizzard actually implement a threat reduction of x%, but the calculation above is certainly how I'd interpret a "29% threat reduction", in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Even if I'm wrong, he should show how he gets those numbers.
Then there's the downright peculiar
Quote:
DPSer A generates 1300 threat on the mob in five seconds (260 DPS)
followed by
Quote:
if DPSer A generated 1400 threat on the mob in 5 seconds (400 DPS)
Eh? DPSer A somehow upped his DPS by over 50%, for an 8% threat increase?
Even ignoring the way that the original A vs B comparison is unclear as to how A's threat reduction is taken into account, I can't see how the quoted numbers can both be correct.
If anyone can explain to me why those numbers are correct, I will gratefully accept that I'm talking out my ***, and go back to school :)
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 7:47pm by zhaharik - I have a nasty feeling I'm going back to school, but looking forward to finding out why :)
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 7:48pm by zhaharik
Quote:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Yeah I had a problem with this statement.
I play a rogue in SSC and a feral druid in heroics. I find that as a rogue I am a lot more careful about my threat than as a druid.
If I overagro on my rogue in heroics I can *usually* hit feint and/or vanish in time to not die. In SSC overagro = one shot death despite 10k health.
If I overagro on my druid in heriocs I just go into bear form and start dancing until the tank gets agro back. If the tank is busy then I just offtank. My survivability is a lot higher as a druid than a rogue.
Vanish has a cooldown. Bear form does not.
Looking forward to patch - except global cooldown change on mangle.
Edited, Feb 12th 2008 7:53pm by Minxete
Lorimath wrote:
Something that doesn't make sense to me. The discussion on why not to use Ferocious Bite just absolutely makes no sense.
In other words, because FB sets your energy back to 0, you have to wait 8.5 seconds after every FB before you can Shred again. If you look at the efficiency numbers again, you’ll see that Ferocious Bite isn’t even that much better than Shred, particularly at high levels of attack power. So the interruption to your Shred cycle just isn’t worth it. Only use Ferocious Bite if you’re fighting the last mob in the pull and FB would actually kill the mob.
Let's ignore the convoluted explanation, it is meaningless. Let's break things down to their most simple form.
A talented Shred = 42 Energy Points.
Ferocious Bite = 35 Energy points + whatever you have left, usually 5 as ticks are 20 energy points at once, ergo FB usually uses 40 energy points if you use it as soon as you can. Still less than Shred.
Ferocious Bite does a lot more damage than Shred. A LOT. A Shred crit at the point my feral druid is at will hit for around 2K damage, maybe more and maybe less depending on the armor of the target. On average, my 5 combo point / 40 energy FBs will crit for well over 3K damage.
Quote:
In other words, because FB sets your energy back to 0, you have to wait 8.5 seconds after every FB before you can Shred again. If you look at the efficiency numbers again, you’ll see that Ferocious Bite isn’t even that much better than Shred, particularly at high levels of attack power. So the interruption to your Shred cycle just isn’t worth it. Only use Ferocious Bite if you’re fighting the last mob in the pull and FB would actually kill the mob.
Let's ignore the convoluted explanation, it is meaningless. Let's break things down to their most simple form.
A talented Shred = 42 Energy Points.
Ferocious Bite = 35 Energy points + whatever you have left, usually 5 as ticks are 20 energy points at once, ergo FB usually uses 40 energy points if you use it as soon as you can. Still less than Shred.
Ferocious Bite does a lot more damage than Shred. A LOT. A Shred crit at the point my feral druid is at will hit for around 2K damage, maybe more and maybe less depending on the armor of the target. On average, my 5 combo point / 40 energy FBs will crit for well over 3K damage.
My Assumptions: From the rest of your post, it sounds as if you are still in Kara and you are using a lot of PvP gear.
I'm not sure what kind of figures you have in your dps gear (crit, AP). But a decently geared feral in SSC/TK will be looking at somewhere along the lines of 40% crit and 3.5-4k AP when buffed. I don't have great dps gear as I'm resto but I can push 3.5k AP (2.8k unbuffed + BoMight + Battle Shout + Kings) and 36% crit fully buffed in my Kara dps gear (when I do spec feral). My shreds crit for almost 3k. My FBs? Maybe 3.5k
I'm not gonna do the math for you as I havent slept in 3 days (insomnia FTL) but when you have half decent PvE gear FB sucks. Especially when you realise it will take an extra 4.5 seconds after FB for you to Shred than it would take for you to shred after another shred. The guy really knows what he is talking about and his uide is both clear and spot on.
Lorimath wrote:
Quote:
There is one key difference between a rogue and a cat: rogues are a lot more survivable. If a rogue pulls aggro he has all sorts of things he can do to save himself. Cats do not. Don’t pull aggro.
Pardon me while I laugh myself into a coma.
Simple truth later in the game: You will get one-shotted if you pull aggro. You might get lucky and dodge a blow or even a couple in a row. That's your only chance to survive. Turn to bear you might get 3 shotted instead. A rogue has evasion, vanish, feint, blind (for trash), Cloak of Shadows. Probably missing some but as you can see they have a lot more options.
Edit: Double post. Power outages + no sleep + bad internet making me extremely cranky
Edited, Feb 13th 2008 6:12am by AnotherSquirrel
Edited, Feb 13th 2008 6:12am by AnotherSquirrel
I have to agree with AnotherSquirrel (what a name, lol). If you want the maths under that, go to the Elitistjerks forum, they have it and a lot more. I just want to add that FB is great for both PvP and leveling/soloing, when you need more burst damage and less sustained DPS.
IMO, the only usage of FB in raids is, perhaps, when you do FB then a powershift right before the energy tick and you have furor. But you wont be able to do that during all the fight with bosses. Your mana will end before, probably. The only problem with this is that you have to have a latency near 0, or at least, be really good to calculate your moves within your latency. If you don't, you will be wasting energy.
And I have to agree that in a comparison between rogue X cat, rogue has more survivability, because they have so many ways to drop aggro to 0, while cat has 1 way to drop a useless amount of aggro.
Don't forget that Kara is the first raid and a T4 dungeon. If you get past that, you get aggro, you die. Be it a rogue or a kitty. Even if the kitty becomes a bear, he will die, usually. So, just don't pull aggro. Learn to use Omen and DON'T PULL AGGRO. Easy enough.
IMO, the only usage of FB in raids is, perhaps, when you do FB then a powershift right before the energy tick and you have furor. But you wont be able to do that during all the fight with bosses. Your mana will end before, probably. The only problem with this is that you have to have a latency near 0, or at least, be really good to calculate your moves within your latency. If you don't, you will be wasting energy.
And I have to agree that in a comparison between rogue X cat, rogue has more survivability, because they have so many ways to drop aggro to 0, while cat has 1 way to drop a useless amount of aggro.
Don't forget that Kara is the first raid and a T4 dungeon. If you get past that, you get aggro, you die. Be it a rogue or a kitty. Even if the kitty becomes a bear, he will die, usually. So, just don't pull aggro. Learn to use Omen and DON'T PULL AGGRO. Easy enough.
I agree that the first bit is not written very clearly, but I think you guys are getting bogged down by the figures he has written to try and illustrate his point.
Take a druid & a warlock. We are limited by how much threat the tank can produce whereas the Warlock can soulshatter in a fight and can theoretically do twice as much damage than us without pulling agro.
A druid who sits at 95% of the tanks threat without ever pulling agro is a skilled player, playing his class to the max of its ability (DPS wise). The warlock may do significantly more damage than the druid but still may have only done 75% of his "theoretically possible DPS" (limited by tank threat).
I see this all the time with locks taking it easy so they don't pull agro instead of going harder, using soulshatter then going hard again.
Take a druid & a warlock. We are limited by how much threat the tank can produce whereas the Warlock can soulshatter in a fight and can theoretically do twice as much damage than us without pulling agro.
A druid who sits at 95% of the tanks threat without ever pulling agro is a skilled player, playing his class to the max of its ability (DPS wise). The warlock may do significantly more damage than the druid but still may have only done 75% of his "theoretically possible DPS" (limited by tank threat).
I see this all the time with locks taking it easy so they don't pull agro instead of going harder, using soulshatter then going hard again.
Brisin wrote:
And I have to agree that in a comparison between rogue X cat, rogue has more survivability, because they have so many ways to drop aggro to 0, while cat has 1 way to drop a useless amount of aggro.
Rogues have one way to drop threat to 0, which is Vanish. The only other way for a Rogue to drop threat is Feint, which is the equivalent of Cower, and about as useful. Anesthetic poison helps with threat generation, but at the expense of damage dealt.
Rarebeast, I agree that the point Nabterayl is making is very valid, but if you're going to use numbers to illustrate an argument, you should use them properly, and explain your calculations. I still can't decide if his calculations are wrong, or just obscure, because it's not clear how he's getting those numbers.
Brisin wrote:
I have to agree with AnotherSquirrel (what a name, lol). If you want the maths under that, go to the Elitistjerks forum, they have it and a lot more. I just want to add that FB is great for both PvP and leveling/soloing, when you need more burst damage and less sustained DPS.
IMO, the only usage of FB in raids is, perhaps, when you do FB then a powershift right before the energy tick and you have furor. But you wont be able to do that during all the fight with bosses. Your mana will end before, probably. The only problem with this is that you have to have a latency near 0, or at least, be really good to calculate your moves within your latency. If you don't, you will be wasting energy.
And I have to agree that in a comparison between rogue X cat, rogue has more survivability, because they have so many ways to drop aggro to 0, while cat has 1 way to drop a useless amount of aggro.
Don't forget that Kara is the first raid and a T4 dungeon. If you get past that, you get aggro, you die. Be it a rogue or a kitty. Even if the kitty becomes a bear, he will die, usually. So, just don't pull aggro. Learn to use Omen and DON'T PULL AGGRO. Easy enough.
IMO, the only usage of FB in raids is, perhaps, when you do FB then a powershift right before the energy tick and you have furor. But you wont be able to do that during all the fight with bosses. Your mana will end before, probably. The only problem with this is that you have to have a latency near 0, or at least, be really good to calculate your moves within your latency. If you don't, you will be wasting energy.
And I have to agree that in a comparison between rogue X cat, rogue has more survivability, because they have so many ways to drop aggro to 0, while cat has 1 way to drop a useless amount of aggro.
Don't forget that Kara is the first raid and a T4 dungeon. If you get past that, you get aggro, you die. Be it a rogue or a kitty. Even if the kitty becomes a bear, he will die, usually. So, just don't pull aggro. Learn to use Omen and DON'T PULL AGGRO. Easy enough.
I went to Elitistjerks and they said to use Ferocious Bite in the posts I read. Care to link the discussion you are mentioning? The posts I read were in the Feral Druid Megathread.
Overall, I rate this Wowhead cat dps guide a paltry 4 / 10. Poorly written, confusing, and with extremely lacking explanations.
Edited, Feb 13th 2008 7:16pm by Lorimath
Lorimath wrote:
I went to Elitistjerks and they said to use Ferocious Bite in the posts I read. Care to link the discussion you are mentioning? The posts I read were in the Feral Druid Megathread.
Edited, Feb 13th 2008 7:16pm by Lorimath
Could you link that post? That thread has over 50+ pages and there is nothing about FB on the first page.
The first mention I saw of FB was on page 23, post 563 or so.
edit: After scanning all 70+ pages for FB/bite, about half the people there said FB is a waste of energy, and the other half said it's only useful at 35-41 energy (depending on having or not having expertise and 4t6). None of the posts had any actual data for damage/energy for FB or shred.
Edited, Feb 14th 2008 1:43pm by AstarintheDruid
Quote:
I'm making a spreadsheet to try out different combo of attacks/finishers/etc to see how much better/worse different play styles are. One problem I ran into was lack of info on Ferocious Bite damage so I did some tests to come up with the equation myself. While the spreadsheet is still being worked on, I thought I'd share the FB findings.
For the TLDR version, a 5 pt FB has its damage as follows:
Top end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + HighDamage * 2 + Base
Low end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + LowDamage * 2 + Base
where
ApMult = 0.25
AP = characters displayed AP
EnergyMult = 4.1 (as displayed on tooltip)
Energy = Energy at the time of FB minus FB's cost of 35
HighDamage/LowDamage = the high/low displayed on the tooltip for a rank 6 FB
Base = -966.43 +/- .02?
These numbers are then adjusted based on talents and mob mitigation as normal.
For details of how I came up with this:
I used the unkillable servants in blasted lands for all of my number crunching.
First I needed the mobs mitigation. My character sheet displays damage as 254-277 + 7 x 110% which is 287.1 to 312.4. I observed white hits doing 217 to 236 which gave me a mitigation of ~.2443.
Next I ran 3 tests and recorded 40-60 FB hits for each test.
Test #1 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.
Test #2 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar and an OOC proc, then FB.
Test #3 was with 1997 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.
Test #1 had high/low of 1586 / 1640, w/o talents and mitigation: 1907 / 1973
Test #2 had high/low of 1706 / 1758, w/o talents and mitigation: 2051 / 2115
Test #3 had high/low of 1389 / 1441, w/o talents and mitigation: 1670 / 1734
The first problem is that the tooltip says that damage is based on the static values of AP and Energy, and a variable value of the listed damage range (935 - 968) which is a range of 33. But my attacks have a range of ~66. So using a 2x multiplier with the listed damage makes this issue go away. Removing this factor results in:
Test #1: 37.59 / 37.56
Test #2: 181.9 / 179.6
Test #3: -199.3 / -201.9
With only AP and energy left to solve for.
Next was to verify the 4.1 energy multiplier as listed on the tooltip. Test #1 results in 100-35=65 energy being used with the multiplier while test #2 uses all 100 energy for the multiplier since the 35 energy of the FB itself is free due to an OOC proc. Removing this results in:
Test #1: -288.9 / -288.9
Test #2: -288.0 / -230.4
Test #3: -465.9 / -468.4
Now for the AP scaling factor. Using excel's solver, I came up with ~.25 which results in:
Test #1: -966.41 / -966.44
Test #2: -965.58 / -967.94
Test #3: -965.11 / -967.67
This remaining value is the Base tacked on to the end of the equation.
Based on this, test #2 should have been able to register a hit for 1759 and test #3 with a 1388 and 1442 but I ran out of people to talk to while beating on mobs and didn't record any extra data points.
Afterwards, I recorded about 50 FB's of random AP and energy and everything fell within the limits of this equation.
So after all that, plugging these values into my damage spreadsheet, I get that FB damage is approximately equal to shred damage when at 0 energy and gets considerably worse from there. So heres the proof that FB does in fact suck without the Feral Aggression talent, but might be useful to non ferals that don't have the shred energy savings of Shredding Attacks.
For the TLDR version, a 5 pt FB has its damage as follows:
Top end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + HighDamage * 2 + Base
Low end:
ApMult * AP + EnergyMult * Energy + LowDamage * 2 + Base
where
ApMult = 0.25
AP = characters displayed AP
EnergyMult = 4.1 (as displayed on tooltip)
Energy = Energy at the time of FB minus FB's cost of 35
HighDamage/LowDamage = the high/low displayed on the tooltip for a rank 6 FB
Base = -966.43 +/- .02?
These numbers are then adjusted based on talents and mob mitigation as normal.
For details of how I came up with this:
I used the unkillable servants in blasted lands for all of my number crunching.
First I needed the mobs mitigation. My character sheet displays damage as 254-277 + 7 x 110% which is 287.1 to 312.4. I observed white hits doing 217 to 236 which gave me a mitigation of ~.2443.
Next I ran 3 tests and recorded 40-60 FB hits for each test.
Test #1 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.
Test #2 was with 2950 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar and an OOC proc, then FB.
Test #3 was with 1997 AP, rake to 5 CP, wait for a full energy bar, then FB.
Test #1 had high/low of 1586 / 1640, w/o talents and mitigation: 1907 / 1973
Test #2 had high/low of 1706 / 1758, w/o talents and mitigation: 2051 / 2115
Test #3 had high/low of 1389 / 1441, w/o talents and mitigation: 1670 / 1734
The first problem is that the tooltip says that damage is based on the static values of AP and Energy, and a variable value of the listed damage range (935 - 968) which is a range of 33. But my attacks have a range of ~66. So using a 2x multiplier with the listed damage makes this issue go away. Removing this factor results in:
Test #1: 37.59 / 37.56
Test #2: 181.9 / 179.6
Test #3: -199.3 / -201.9
With only AP and energy left to solve for.
Next was to verify the 4.1 energy multiplier as listed on the tooltip. Test #1 results in 100-35=65 energy being used with the multiplier while test #2 uses all 100 energy for the multiplier since the 35 energy of the FB itself is free due to an OOC proc. Removing this results in:
Test #1: -288.9 / -288.9
Test #2: -288.0 / -230.4
Test #3: -465.9 / -468.4
Now for the AP scaling factor. Using excel's solver, I came up with ~.25 which results in:
Test #1: -966.41 / -966.44
Test #2: -965.58 / -967.94
Test #3: -965.11 / -967.67
This remaining value is the Base tacked on to the end of the equation.
Based on this, test #2 should have been able to register a hit for 1759 and test #3 with a 1388 and 1442 but I ran out of people to talk to while beating on mobs and didn't record any extra data points.
Afterwards, I recorded about 50 FB's of random AP and energy and everything fell within the limits of this equation.
So after all that, plugging these values into my damage spreadsheet, I get that FB damage is approximately equal to shred damage when at 0 energy and gets considerably worse from there. So heres the proof that FB does in fact suck without the Feral Aggression talent, but might be useful to non ferals that don't have the shred energy savings of Shredding Attacks.
edit: After scanning all 70+ pages for FB/bite, about half the people there said FB is a waste of energy, and the other half said it's only useful at 35-41 energy (depending on having or not having expertise and 4t6). None of the posts had any actual data for damage/energy for FB or shred.
Edited, Feb 14th 2008 1:43pm by AstarintheDruid
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